Photo credit: Dr Susan Bartie
Dr Susan Bartie is a passionate socio-legal historian at the ANU Law School. She is currently working on a 50-year history of Australian environmental lawyers (both academic and practising). This project builds on her prior studies of the discipline of law and is part of her broader academic agenda: to strengthen the empirical dimensions of law and better integrate them into mainstream legal studies and cognate disciplines.
Dr Bartie’s motivation to explore these topics began with a curiosity about the discipline which led her to the impressive work of scholars such as David Sugarman, Laura Kalman, Wes Pue, Robert Gordon, Fiona Cownie, Susan Carle and John Henry Schlegel.
“The questions they asked about law and legal culture and the breadth and depth of their research struck me as both incredibly important as well as fascinating,” says Dr Bartie.
Dr Bartie says she was drawn to study environmental lawyers as she suspected that their emergence in the 1970s could generate new knowledge about law and legal culture.
“The idea of the environment firmly entered legal discourse in Australia in the 1970s. While historians have studied how this idea revolutionised the sciences and international and national politics (in earlier decades), the influence of this idea, and the concepts of environmental justice and climate change, on lawyers and legal practice has not been fully explored.”
“I believe, in the context of the climate crisis, that history can both provide an important tool for reflection, and it can generate the creative thinking required from individuals and groups, including lawyers and lawyer associations, to ameliorate harms.”
In 2024, Dr Bartie chaired two transdisciplinary conversations among scholars from around the globe at the World Congress for Environmental History on the topic of law, history and the environment.
“The purpose was to create a new global network of environmental legal history scholars and to promote general awareness of the significant work being conducted in this field. It has led to the establishment of an online global working group on this topic which has attracted a great deal of interest.”
A further highlight from 2024 was publishing her first work (with Meredith Hagger) on the history of law and the environment.
“Bringing the idea of the environment to law: A comparative study of early environmental law textbooks is a precursor to my studies of environmental lawyers, comparing the central ideas presented in early environmental textbooks in Australia, Canada (English speaking), England, New Zealand and the US.”
In 2025, having completed extensive interviews with over 60 environmental lawyers throughout Australia, as well as archival research, Dr Bartie will continue to analyse and write up the research to share it at various forums, including at a symposium devoted to the topic.